We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC Unity XT based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The two products received similar reviews in most categories. According to reviews, Dell EMC PowerStore appears to be a bit more robust and therefore more appropriate for larger environments.
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"The latency is good."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The solution's technical support is excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"Its flexibility is valuable because we have had some moments where we had to adapt, and it has been quite flexible."
"Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against those of all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have."
"It is very easy to use. Access is very friendly. It shows you a lot of important information at the first glance. It has been very easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores..."
"I like the performance of the PowerStore. When you talk about PowerStore, it's mainly about flash systems and high-end IOPS. The 1000T is a midsize box, in terms of the way the vendor positions it, but it is more than enough for our needs."
"Reliable, with comprehensive features and a well-established support base."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"The most valuable aspects of this solution are its stability, performance, and ease of updating."
"The solution is so easy to manage that I forget it is there."
"Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution."
"The solution overall has high performance."
"We use replication for disaster recovery (DR), making our DR process much easier."
"It has helped us be able to use less administrators per device or system. Therefore,we are more streamlined."
"It's an all-flash Unity, With that compression feature, it's comparable to a hybrid. That is one thing that we definitely like."
"The Unity XT box is very strong. It doesn't break. The MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"We need better data deduplication."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"More demonstration and training options are needed."
"The solution only does thin provisioning."
"The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space."
"When you create a case on Dell's support website, you don't always get someone who is experienced in the kind of systems you need help with...making it an area where Dell's support team needs to make improvements."
"You cannot delegate permissions."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"The customer service and support are bad."
"The price is on the higher side."
"We noticed in the last release of code that there were some inefficiencies around getting our data efficiency up in terms of dedupe and compression."
"The pre-sales technical support and technical engagement could be made better for this product."
"Because we can do synchronous replication between the two sites, this made the setup challenging for this piece. They did not know how to set this up initially. We ended up having to do bidirectional synchronous replication."
"We would like to see more advanced integration capability added to this solution."
"It isn't easy to find trusted partners for the product. The solution has issues with mid-level storage and does not come with enterprise storage."
"If there's anything Dell EMC could do to get the same performance for a cheaper price, that would be great."
"This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for."
"As the solution continues to grow and gain more traction, things will come up that will just continue to deepen the integration between VMware, vCenter, and all those other components. Anything in the divisibility there and additional tools is always great."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 47 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". Dell PowerStore is most compared with IBM FlashSystem, Pure Storage FlashArray, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell Unity XT report.
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Hello Yasin,
The best solution depends upon your host environment. In general, PowerStore is more powerful than Unity but Unity is also a very good Storage solution.
The Unity 400 is a rather old, a much less powerfull solution and at its best holds ssd flashdrives if at all. Currently you have the Unity 8xx model, which has more CPU punch and therefore maxes out less fast on CPU utilisation. What this means is that you can add more shelves and disks and workloads to it before you hit the roof.
The powerstore 1200 is an nvme storage, is 60% more powerfull (compared to FC/SCSI-SSD on Unity) in our case, and has higher datareduction rates. If the unity reaches out to a datareduction rate of 1.5 or 2, the Powerstore T1200 is capable of 3 to 3.5 datareduction, probably due to half its blocksize. The price of the device is pretty much dependant on the price of its media, and therefore the Powerstore T1200 is the absolute winner.
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Another aspect is that the Powerstore can be used to build a cluster of arrays compared to the sync/asynch replication only feature of the Unity series, rendering the mirrored volumes unuseable unless one fails over to it, like in a disaster recovery scenario.
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The Powerstore also allows true A/A volumes on both sides . What this means is that one can build stretched vSphere clusters and the loss of your array in one site will still allow writing to the alternate protected disk, transparently ! You can have site local writes to your volumes and remain in sync without a need to cross site write.
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There is not much of a reason to settle for the Unity anymore, though some still prefer the Unity for NAS compared to Powerstore, but honestly speaking I won't recommend to use any of both for that purpose unless for limitted useage. Unity allocates RAM ressources dynamically when used for FC/SCSI AND NAS , whereas the Powerstore is initialized in a kind of split off of RAM ressources between NAS/FC SCSI at installation time. The ressource allocation is fixed and can't be altered lateron. Thats a hard call. So I'd favour the Unity only if you use it for low/moderate NAS needs in combination with FC/SCSI or block data and you don't have the budget nor the size to use a NAS optimised array on top.